April 15th Is Near! Have You Claimed Your Penguin As Your Dependent Yet?

This tax season you have surely wondered why you weren't allowed to claim your talking parakeet as a dependent. Many of you maintain a strong loving relationship with your cats, dogs, hamsters, or sheep. You can't imagine life without your pet - just like your next door neighbor whose companion happens to be human - yet you are denied the same rights, respect, and recognition that your neighbor enjoys - only because your companion happens to be a member of another species.

Would like animals to have the same rights as the ruling class humans? That is exactly what the intellectually muddled post-modern philosophers wants us to believe! Animal rights are a sharp tool in the hands of the eggheads who constitute the socialist intelligentsia, and they use it effectively to level the playing field for the lazy unthinking slobs they call the People.

The concept of animal rights confers rights on creatures simply because they have feelings; it doesn't examine the creature's nature beyond that. If the feeling of pleasure and pain alone entitles you to rights, then a central nervous system of a cockroach or a bat becomes the universal moral code for us all. There's really no difference, then, between a bunch of centipedes and the 3rd Capitalist Cabal Internationale. If we do not organize as a class and fight against animal rights today, we will go the way of the Dodo bird and soon the world will turn for us no more.

You would think that if Ms Fluffy is good enough to share your bedroom, she must be good enough to be accepted as your dependent by the US government. But this isn't what the Republican administration is thinking when it criminalizes pet care by consensual adults. Why are we treated like second-class citizens, denied the right to a relationship with our loved ones - only because they are different kinds of organisms? What happened to the equal protection clause? Shouldn't we call the ACLU about this?

If you've asked yourself these legitimate questions, then you've only touched the vast tangle of bigotry, speciism, and animal oppression growing at the heart of American culture. In fact, the offensive tax restriction is a mere weapon in a culture war against progress. Stop asking questions, start acting - we want our country back! And by all means, call the ACLU.

It is obvious that civil rights, including the right to vote, are not contingent upon paying taxes, owning property, or even with having a mind. Millions of people who haven't worked a day in their lives and have forgotten how to read, still successfully participate in electoral process to ensure their status as government's dependents. True, animals don't have the cognitive function to realize what they're missing. But having a mind was never an advantage in our progressive movement. Animals can be trained. If they can ride a bicycle in a circus, they can rally for economic, political, and cultural rights in Union Square. It must become a duty of every progressive pet owner guardian, to train a pet to walk in the street with a sign (see picture).

This is nothing new. Everyone knows that social progress can only be achieved by assigning guilt for perceived absurdities that result from the persistent shifting of paradigms. We split you into groups and assign blame or victimhood accordingly. It's called social studies. Our academics have designed a diverse hierarchy of victimized minorities that has long ago surpassed the complexity of the periodic table. Once a new victim group is discovered and properly tagged, our activists quickly re-educate them about class struggle and train them to go out into the streets with slogans advocating [insert current truth here].

The ever increasing diversity of victims calls for a more universal classification. It's now easier to define them by what they are "NOT" - non-Exploiters, non-Males, non-Europeans, non-Christians, non-Infidels, non-Corporate, non-Straight, non-Healthy, non-Citizens - or, in this case, non-Humans. The more groups you are a part of, the higher you score in the Progressive Social Hierarchy. Until recently, the highest score was achieved by Fatima Jones, a homeless female homosexual Pygmy, an HIV positive crack whore of Muslim faith, mentally traumatized by a sexually abusive Catholic priest, currently on death row for stealing a motorized electrical shopping cart at Wall-Mart. The inclusion of non-Humans has shifted the paradigm even further. Now first place is being disputed by Silo and Roy - two gay penguins at the New York Central Park Zoo, and Wendell and Cass - another pair of gay penguins at the New York Aquarium. The jury is still out on which pair is more progressive: Wendell and Cass represent a proud minority of African black-footed penguins, while Silo and Roy have fostered an egg together during the mating season, delivering a decisive blow to the opponents of gay marriage.

The zoo, of course, represents a perfect social model wherein the subjects are free to exercise their instinctive impulses while being provided for by a benevolent group of scientists and caretakers.

As further social progress erases remaining boundaries between species, genders, faiths, cultures, and occupations, the social hierarchy will become so complex that any group larger than three will have to be separated from others by an unobtrusive mesh wire. It might even be a solid partition - to prevent one's cultural impulses from offending someone else's cultural sensibilities. That, of course, comes with thousands of new government jobs - to arbitrate what is offensive and what is not, to maintain partitions, and to provide scientifically measured care to harebrained constituents. Is this not the New American Dream worth fighting for?

Just add animals into the equation and see the quote below transform into something completelty different:

"The ambition of those left below the qualifying limit increases in proportion to the number of those above it. Finally the exception becomes the rule; concessions follow one another without interruption, and there is no halting place until universal suffrage has been attained." - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)

The Party has to ensure that all non-human species are registered to vote by late October of this year and see to it that they ALL vote Demokratic... I mean they are more than qualified, I even heard Comrade Bill Clinton had a atleast a couple hundred chickens working counter-terrorism and another hundred snakes working within the administration. With credentials like that how can you deny them suffrage?!?

Wishing on Lenins dried out corpse for a more progressive future,Chairman Meow.

Comrades, comrades! Why be upset? If you saw some of the people that I consorted with while living in Midland, home of the Bushitler, you would understand that there is no difference at all right now. After all, if all clothing is drag (and it is), then all feathers are drag, as is all fur. I personally have had acquaintance with the species regina vertens oculos clamans exopthalmica (shrieking, bug-eye eye-rolling queen), last seen abandoned in an El Paso motel parking lot. I know from personal experience that it can vote. Although it cannot reproduce, except more Socialists.

Comrades! I have a solution! I know how to swell our cadres!

I hasten to point out that I am a converted Socialist, not having been born to the brown, er, purple.

Here in the great big brown land of Stray-ya, we have a whole political party made up entirely of misunderstood progressives who just want their legitimate relationships with marsupials no longer discriminated against by the fascist Kristian oppressors. They're called "Greens" and I am their leader.

We will not compromise. Some of the Kristian Right demand that we at least support only relationships with mammals of the opposite gender. Naturally we told them absolutely not. Anything less than total freedom is sick and disgusting.

Some of our marsupial komrades have become so disenfranchised by the persecution, discrimination and lack of recognition of our constitutionally mandated relationships, they have been forced to take up arms in a desperate last measure against the oppressor.

Ah. A fellow Socialist from Down Under. I see you've made nine posts, and I encourage you to join in the good Socialist fun. We are red of tooth and claw.

But are you sure that you are not being less than totally free Down Under? What about people who want to marry people with nothing down under? I do not think that Algore has anything there but hydraulic hoses, for he's run by the Disney team that made the Animatronic Abe Lincoln at Walt Disney World. It's very impressive--I saw it in 1984 and thought what a wonderful Apparatchik he would be for the Party. If he got off message, just change his programming. The Brits think he acts like he's got a rod up his bum but it was just old programming.

And what about creatures who are identified by their private parts, or who are nothing but a private part? Senator Schumer is nothing but a pecker, and Hillary, although our Empress, is nothing but a box. Invaluable allies both and I would never dream of denying them reproductive rights.

But that gives me pause to think. If we have free VD clinics, would that slow the expansion of Party members?

I'm glad to see we're recycling here at the Cube....being so close to Ira Einhorn-stuffed in a trunk-hidden in a closet-goo dripping from the apartment downstairs ceiling-something smells dead-thanks Arlen Specter-Smurf Day.

I just saw Bryan Hathaway's EIT return. He claimed Rudolph (no, not Mikael silly, Rudolph The Dead Deer Roadkill) and got a big chunk coming back from Uncle Sam.

Me, I owed $1700. I asked if I could just cut a check to the welfare crackheads two doors down from me and eliminate the middleman but I was told it wouldn't be fair to the bureaucrats....after all, it's about fairness.

Laika, of course it's all about fairness. I recall back when I was in high school, studying Marx on the side, and reading Mein Kampf under the covers at night with a flashlight fondling myself--and you thought I was merely queer--reading Orwell's Animal Farm. After Napoleon the Pig and the other pigs sell the broken-down horse to the knacker, they are seen in the farm house, acting just like the farmers they ran off.

The other animals take comfort in the sign painted that says, "All animals are created equal." Only the jackass, who will not talk, can read that underneath it the pigs have added, "But some animals are more equal than others."

You are indeed first among equals, Commissar Theocritus. But then again, aren't all Inner Party members? Collectively we make up a small group of ruling elites... some may call this the "Politburo Standing Committee", which in the PRC is the most powerful body (if you want to consider it a "body") of Party faithful. And, as members of the TPC Standing Committee, it is, indeed, our power and collective goal to stand on the throats of the meager, meek and unwashed masses of the world while we, the more equal, rape, pillage and take on behalf of the Common Good™. This of course is Socialism in it's purest form and an ideology that we all embrace with open arms and bleeding hearts (although I have no real heart, no, I paid top dollar for the Jarvik Artificial Heart so that I may keep more of other people's money).

Ah, Meow. I too love the tax season. Just think. We take money that people have worked for, with menaces of imprisonment if they don't part with it. Even if their children need something our needs are greater. Just today I was in a gallery of blown and cut glass and thought now nice that particular vase would look in the hall of my new house, on the table with the wrought-iron legs, on the flagstone, with a halogen floodlight--screams at you, doesn't? Might as well take out an ad. And considering the single mother with the Downs' syndrome child with cerebral palsy who begged me, just the other day, to let her keep some of her money, I refused because she touched my Gucci loafers with her lips when it is supposed to a symbolic obeisance, not a real one. They're messy. Snot and all.

And considering that I took her money and turned it into this lovely vase--what could be pleasanter? Her drooling child; oh, she says she loves it, but these people have no real emotions; they don't really feel pain, just fear. And so I am the philosopher's stone, turning widows' tears into glass art for me.

And just think how many candy canes that child had to put into a board with holes drilled in it, just to count them up to put in a cellphone bag. Why, I gave that child months and months of useful work, keeping it off my manicured lawns.

So, Chairman Meow, it's really for their own good. And that's why we tell them why we want their money. And we cannot just let them keep it, for they might do the wrong thing with it. Bill Clinton let that one out of the bag, and that's why I let him get impeached. And you may not have noticed, but his womanizing cut down too. I had some of the Party doctors pay him a visit and now he pees through a tube. But we let him grope a cleaning woman once in a while.

Ah. Now for a nice sleep on silk sheets; I'm allergic to anything else. And these are a special gift from the Forbidden City, made from the silk of a species of silkworms specially bred by the Ming dynasty and kept hidden throughout the Cultural Revolution, and which are so sensitive that their best silk is spun while they are being sung to by Chinese women with bound feet. And since that's outlawed, or so they say, now in China, I have by my own ways managed to insure that an entire mountain tribe has become an untribe and all the women have their feet bound to sing to the silkworms used to make my sheets.

And let me tell you about the lace that I use for toilet paper some day.

Navigator, let us never lose sight that some people years ago bravely rebelled against an oppressive government and set up the United States of America. This was a horrible thing, of course, for it was dedicated to freedom and some people actually meant it, and mean it to this day. But this was before the groundbreaking research of Comrade Marx and the governmental experiments of dear Lenin and Mao, who showed us how to run a tidy house, free of all that messy individuality. And after all, the People don't really want freedom. They want to be told what to do.

We are well situated here, with people such as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and all of the Useful Idiots of Hollywood who speak so movingly about the errors and sins of Americans, and that all these can be expunged only if we follow the lead of enlightened people such as Algore and Our Many Titted Empress Hillary Vagina.

People who will think for the masses. People who will take money from the masses and tell them not to resent it. In other words, our sort of people.

isn't that what your constitution says, "for the people, by the people?"Good catch, SMO! What about the dolphins, and penguins, and polar bears who are drowning in droves? Why aren't they included? Why isn't there nothing in the Constitution that says "save the polar bears"?

The Constitution is a speciist document offensive and intolerant to non-human beings and appliances. Reason number 3084545 for it to be revised!

I'm glad to see we're recycling here at the Cube....being so close to Ira Einhorn-stuffed in a trunk-hidden in a closet-goo dripping from the apartment downstairs ceiling-something smells dead-thanks Arlen Specter-Smurf Day.

I just saw Bryan Hathaway's EIT return. He claimed Rudolph (no, not Mikael silly, Rudolph The Dead Deer Roadkill) and got a big chunk coming back from Uncle Sam.

Me, I owed $1700. I asked if I could just cut a check to the welfare crackheads two doors down from me and eliminate the middleman but I was told it wouldn't be fair to the bureaucrats....after all, it's about fairness.

I'm just glad the USA sent a whopping $50,000 in aid to help the Italian animals displaced by that mag 6 earthquake. There must have been quite a few chickens and cats and dogs and maybe some goats or horses that lost their barns with a quake that size. Why, if we as a government with a country don't look out for the little fuzzy creatures, who will? Government needs to step in and care for all the wombats and woozles and willy-nillies and sidewinders, newts and flukes and quaggas and goombas and ponies and breakfast cereals and bats and sea urchins and gherkins and ticks and rats and tapeworms and lampreys and fungus and the thousand other unnamed critters that populate our wonderful rainforest world.

You are proletarianly welcome. When your name appears on the ACORN voter registry list, I will exhume you (if I have to wait until the Siberian thaw, so be it) to dress you in the fleece you so right deserve as an honor befitting such a more equal Party member.

Oh, dear Comrades, the memories that you stir up. In the 80s I ran around with people who listened to that music and who were amused and tolerant of my Mozart. And finally I see that they meant sheep!

By the way, if you want humbling, listen to Mozart's 5th piano concerto. I listened to it last night while driving in San Antonio. He was, what, 10? You can hear it if you know but it's better than half the music done by most every composer because even then his wit was obvious.

...and the ostrich and the platypus and the gar and the vampire squid and the common leech and the aphid and the earwig...

Comrade ABCDRex,

This is a wonderful tune that excels in its inclusive nature of nature!

If you live in Japan, you come to notice seemingly every thorp of 10K+ people has an aquarium of sorts. It's a cultural thang, dawg. They're not all that appealing to me, but when I go, I never fail to hear some other visitor say, "That looks delicious." In all my years in flyover hell, I never once thought while driving past barn, coop, stye, whatever: "Hello, dinner!"

But your video has caused a certain change to come over me: if phrased delicately, maybe I should say I want to internalize select members of the depicted ecosystem. If Mr. Crawfish is redistributed to me, I shall create material to redistribute to others, including extended family of said Mr. Crawfish.

In Spring, Star Jones finds her eloquence in realization. In Summer, we basque in the heat of ineptitude. In Fall, Divine and Chi-Chi La Rue are like leaves from the tree being fell. In Winter, we feast our eyes on the abyss of blackholes as it flows into the darkness from which it came.

Now what cuteness would you like to entice that can not be bent over the bed with my scalpel? What mirror shall I look into that I have not seen it's face in hell? Or shall we grease the rear ends of each other and case the sheep on her her throne...

The wit of the boy wonder is grand indeed, but his cage is selected, and the red priest eats delicate wonder in darkness.

Five steps from your backyard I have the flesh readily cooking on my BBQ.

Red Rooster. Four Seasons? The overpriced Canadian hotel chain which thinks that I should pay for its name? Or Vivaldi's? Or Haydn's?

"...the flesh readily cooking on my BBQ." I hear Hannibal Lecter. I like that in a man. After all, there are so many uses for dear Hannibal when one of the doctors at Jifi-Lobo has a bad case of the DTs and manages to, er, harm a comrade who is just in for a minor tune-up. You know, the sort of tune-up that you need when you listen to the glistening words of His O'liness and a cloud of wonder, just wonder, mind you, crosses your mind and you consider it's possible, just barely possible, that is, that he, no HE is nothing more than a construct of the bull sessions of the bien pensant flavored with the bare-knuckle politics of Chicago.

WhenIf you ever suspect that President Zero cannot walk on water and just by a wave of his hands suspect all the laws of nature, including economics, it's time to take an immersion blender to your prefrontal lobes.

I confess. All last night here at Hotel Icon (which is RED, RED, RED), I tossed and turned thinking of Star Jones. I thought of Chi-Chi LaRue, perhaps the most prolific director of porn ever, certainly of gay porn:

Or Glen Milstead, John Water's Divine, who really did eat dog poo in Pink Flamingos.

You know, I think that Star looks a lot more like Chi Chi, don't you? But I'm betting that Chi Chi wouldn't get so bent out of shape with the people who paid for something for her, as Star did about her wedding.

Ah, Comrade I see love in your heart! I have enjoyed these Waters for years. I was admiring the vast wonder of Pink Flamingos when it was born into the glorious culture. When Ms. Divine was eating dog poo, I was enjoying the intestines.

I do agree Comrade, there is a slight resemblance. They are fascinating wonders, whom, if my dear friend Kubrick, were to know then, A Clockwork Orange, might just have featured such wondrous droogs. Rather than meager children of dance and song.

Comrade, Vivaldi is The Red Priest of Venice, surely you know this. As a good doctor, I shall try to be generous to your lambs, those of the slight tune-up variety, but as you know... my slight of scalpel is fit for Graveyards, and Gulags.

Red Rooster, I am flattered that you know of the inspiration for Jifi-Lobo. It is the scene in 2001 when Dave lobotomizes Hal. Turn the tool, out pops a card. People are not made so well so we have to use other methods, and an immersion blender is what I favor.

Why, just the other day Marshall Pupovich, of all people, was over at the Rancho de Rio Grande and he expressed a thought which was not slaveringly idolatrous to His O'liness and Nansky Peloski. Instantly I drugged with a handful of roofies and took him down to Jifi-Lobo.

Red Rooster, I am flattered that you know of the inspiration for Jifi-Lobo. It is the scene in 2001 when Dave lobotomizes Hal. Turn the tool, out pops a card. People are not made so well so we have to use other methods, and an immersion blender is what I favor.

Why, just the other day Marshall Pupovich, of all people, was over at the Rancho de Rio Grande and he expressed a thought which was not slaveringly idolatrous to His O'liness and Nansky Peloski. Instantly I drugged with a handful of roofies and took him down to Jifi-Lobo.

For his own good, you know, for his own good.

Comrades,

A progressive precedent has been set! I propose many other comrades visit Jifi LoBo for my own good. Since I went to college, I am a right-thinking person and am more than qualified to mismanage their estates, where and when required.

Leninka, I'm so glad that you pointed up that some people are fools. When I sit in a room I look all around me and all I see is fools

Try this. Whenever some shit-for-brains comes in and annoys you with his time-bothering self-importance, smile and sigh, saying that you know that he's had a good day because every idiot on earth was before your desk. And look right at him

Such is man's own amour propre that not a single person has gotten it and I've used it dozens of times.

Commissar Theocritus, I wasn't sure if in telling me your modus operandi, you were at the same time using this trick on me. Forgive me for being suspicious, as I myself have used a similar trick, especially on those who have the suffix "Esq." after their names.

Here is an anecdotal account: At a family gathering with my in-laws, I was not amused when I discovered that one such relation, a female of the profession, a virago, termagant, if you get the picture, was mocking me, without even the decency to do it behind my back. First, I waited, composed myself a little, and then, when the time was right, I approached her with the dumbest, most innocent look I could conjure on my face, and said, after some friendly chit-chat, with no hint whatsoever that I was speaking of her in particular, that I was glad I no longer worked for lawyers, as I would rather clean a commode than look a lawyer in the face. She looked at me with the greatest sympathy, and commiseration. It was priceless.

Leninka, I was not looking at you when I said that, but offering it as a tool, an invaluable one. I own a title company and have been working in land title for 38 years one month and 18 days, with time off for college and other things. Never a penny's loss but you cannot believe some of the attitude that I get, or used to get, from young shysters. In less than a week I turn 54 and have learned to let impatience temper my voice, and if I work at it I can convey an upturned lip over the telephone.

Here's another tool. Where I live some people from the Old Country feel better is a deal is negotiated in front of some seeming figure of authority; it's odd when you hear the word patron in a Spanish conversation. There is always endless bickering over little money, there being little money, and it will all be negotiated in front of your desk, with you supplying facts and suggestions. For a $5K house.

Or only one party can be there. But now is not the time to engage in the folly of explaining the workings of Texas real-estate law, or the idea of contracts. Say, "What is you did x and then y? That would mean z." This gets a start. Then there will be more circling. Bear in. "I think it would be a good idea of you did x and then y and you'd have z." Now you're getting more attention instead of the inchoate fog inside the people's heads.

Finally lean back in the chair, fix each one with a gimlet eye, and say, sweetly but in tones which will NOT be denied, "Now. You do x." If necessary go to the other party. "And you do y."

Continue without letting them talk about anything else. Repeat with increasing intensity until you say, "Now you'll do.....?" "x" and bring it on home. Saves hours. I'm not kidding.

Now when I think about it, animals don't have voting rights in Israel!

-out-ov-karakter-I like that method. I'll use it every time somebody really starts to get off acting better than me. Or every time I have to suffer lectures about sex's beauty.

Don't forget, Comrade Skinnee Jay, to make sure you appear as dumb as possible in your delivery. This works especially well for female proles.

Commissar Theocritus

Leninka, I was not looking at you when I said that, but offering it as a tool, an invaluable one. I own a title company and have been working in land title for 38 years one month and18 days, with time off for college and other things. Never a penny's loss but you cannot believe some of the attitude that I get, or used to get, from young shysters. In less than a week I turn 54 and have learned to let impatience temper my voice, and if I work at it I can convey an upturned lip over the telephone.

Here's another tool. Where I live some people from the Old Country feel better is a deal is negotiated in front of some seeming figure of authority; it'so dd when you hear the word patron in a Spanish conversation. There is always endless bickering over little money,there being little money, and it will all be negotiated in front ofyour desk, with you supplying facts and suggestions. For a $5K house.

Or only one party can be there. But now is not the time to engage in the folly of explaining the workings of Texas real-estate law, or the idea of contracts. Say, "What is you did x and then y? That would mean z."This gets a start. Then there will be more circling. Bear in. "I think it would be a good idea of you did x and then y and you'd have z." Now you're getting more attention instead of the inchoate fog inside the people's heads.

Finally lean back in the chair, fix each one with a gimlet eye, and say, sweetly but in tones which will NOT be denied, "Now. You do x." If necessary go to the other party. "And you do y."

Continue without letting them talk about anything else. Repeat with increasing intensity until you say, "Now you'll do.....?" "x" and bring it on home. Saves hours. I'm not kidding.

Commissar Theocritus, now I see why you spend so much time in this property-less gulag, it completely releases you from the responsibility not only of providing documentation for the undocumented, but of having to soil your hands with the dirty and lowly job of assigning property ownership, to greedy, grasping, property owning capitalists. We all have our own particular shovels to bear.

I see, however, your methods of conflict resolution and gaining entry into certain minds, have been fine tuned and honed to perfection.

Leninka, there are other methods. Once an old bat from El Paso named Mary was trying to raise money for her son's second murder defense. She'd been willed a half interest in a lot in Toyah, which is a town of perhaps 35 people and ALL of them cranks. The lot had nothing on it but an old Airstream trailer you could pull off. Value? $250 maybe. Every two weeks she'd call and ask me to see if there was something else, as though I were scanning for UFOs. She came out to Culo de Pecos, 200 miles, with a driver and I started shaking with anger and her driver said, "Mary, let's go."

Then the sent me a letter asking me to check to see that the taxes were paid, even though she'd just paid them. I wrote back from the law firm of "Douie, Cheatham and Howe" saying that owing to a joint investigation of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Texas Attorney General E&W had been permanently put out of busines, and signed it Emil Fahrquarson.

I got a call from the tax assessor-collector, a good friend, who asked, "Theocritus, is there anything wrong? I got this letter..."

This goes to show that some people naturally have no need of Jifi-Lobo and indeed have skulls so hard that all the industrial diamonds made by GE could not penetrate their minds. Red Star's plasma cutter is ineffectual against heads like hers.

That was fine story. Especially the part about the letter. However, I do have a question.

I looked up Culo de Pecos on Google and the only context in which it came up was "Groupthink" via Commissar Theocritus. There's something fishy here. Where, exactly is this Culo de Pecos? Is it near the Boca de Midland? Or the Braso de Odessa? Or where?

And, it's a good thing that tax assessor-collector was indeed, a good friend, Mr. Fahrquarson.

Here is the office that Douie, Cheatham and How took over. Notice the five fancy glass-block windows, and considering my prestige in the community, no more than two or three dozen of them have been shot out.

Notice the condition of the street. (Actually Houston is sending engineers to find out how to improve Kirby and University and Shepherd to that standard.) The building behind the tree is the Lucius Bunton III Federal Courthouse, a pharaonic monument to a federal judge who had a penchant for quoting trashy novels in his opinions. Such was the state of his mind. To the right is the Courthouse.

I'll give you one more story. Until 9/13/93 when Texas had the first change ever in the laws of descent and distribution, when one spouse died his children inherited his half of the community property. This meant that when Maria was going to live a daughter's house she had to get her children to sign their half interest over to her.

Joe came to me with the problem. Eight children. One daughter in San Antonio wouldn't sign. He came in twice a week. "Joe, do you know where she works?"

"Yes."

"Take your mother and get in the car and go to San Antonio. Wait until she gets off work and take her with these papers and get her to a bank that's open until six. Make her sign."

It worked. But if the family is over six children, it's 50/50 that one of them will be in prison. No one in prison ever signs anything for free, even to his wife, to his mother. He needs the money. The current bribe is $200.00.

The scenic vista of your Culo de Pecos does have a charming allure. And, I do hope to one day see it up close, as we plan to take my "dog and pony show" on the road, to give little talks to groups about my newest piece of propaganda (For the ChildrenTM), or perhaps if that does not bring us to the area, then we'll just have to make it a visit for rest and relaxation.

Drier air has a remarkable rejuvenating and beautifying effect on my feminine features.

Speaking of land, I once had a dream that an Arab Sheik had purchased a sizable chunk of Texas, and succeeded in seceding from the union, declared Sharia Law, and there was nothing we could do about it. Just a dream. However, when I heard that Prince Abdullah visited that rabid Bush dog's compound near Crawford, and had purchased some land, my dream came vividly back to me. If Prince Abdullah so wished to do this, now--with our current leader being his devout and obedient subject--would be the perfect time to establish his fiefdom.

The dream itself, did have a nightmarish quality to it, I must admit.

Perhaps, one day, West Texas will be the saffron capital of the hemisphere. Stranger things have happened.

By all means stop at Culo de Pecos. You might find Fort Davis to be as lovely as I do, along with Alpine. And the drive from Fort Davis north past Mt. Locke, where McDonald Observatory is, to Kent, is to my mind the loveliest drive in Texas. Certainly lovelier than the salt marshes of Houston where I went to college. Whose campus walks were covered by bird shit every winter by the two millions cow birds come to eat bugs in the rice fields but who nested in the Rice trees at night.

Of course you need to Spread the Good Socialist Word. For the Children™, for the Planet™, to propitiate Gaia™, to better effect the Progressive World of Next Tuesday™.

Because you just aren't a good progressive unless you hate yourself and hate America.

Comrades, comrades! Why be upset? If you saw some of the people that I consorted with while living in Midland, home of the Bushitler, you would understand that there is no difference at all right now.

Commissar Theo, I mourn for you having spent any time at all in Midland. However it is clearly not as bad as living in Big Spring for the better part of a year... Isn't the Permian Basin such a wonderful place?

Certainly lovelier than the salt marshes of Houston where I went to college. Whose campus walks were covered by bird shit every winter by the two millions cow birds come to eat bugs in the rice fields but who nested in the Rice trees at night.

Commissar Theocritus,

I suspect the Rice trees you speak of are pretty much as they were in your youth. And you called my home a swamp, but after spending many years in a "dry" state (albeit scenic) where the saying was: "People don't die here, they just dry up and blow away" Houston is a tropical resort, palmetto bugs and all (747's, as I prefer to call them, as they are capable of flight).

And did you know, that an exciting recent discovery placed the Battle of San Jacinto in an entirely different location than where it was originally thought to be? Texas Revolution Ended Here

Leninka, I was just in Houston and saw one of the few nice days. And palmetto bugs? If it looks like a roach and it scurries like a roach, it's a roach. When I was living in Hanszen College, every night the roaches would have a square dance on the ceiling over my head. There was a challenge caller from time to time. Most of the students refuse to have a cat because in the dark the only way to tell the difference was by counting the legs and if you got to five you soiled yourself.

Also in that first year I got athlete's foot and jock itch, and a fungus in my ear canal. Then mould would eat the fungus, and crack the ear canal, and eat through the ear drum. Then the fungus would fight the mould, and it would start all over. For two years, until I found a compounding pharmacy and a smart old doctor, I had little hearing in my left ear and it's still somewhat damaged. I figure that I'll take the dry to being infected with fungus from head to tow with an embarrassing stop in between.

7.62, are you going to come out of the closet as being at that--I can hardly type it--military base?

You will have to watch Michael Moore movies and read the DKos for a month in penance for that.

Commissar Theo, I was in Big Spring, from the summer of 2001 to the spring of 2002. The military base there had been gone for about 50 years IIRC. I have never been in the military, as the recruiter told me I was nearly too tall to get in, and would have to apply for a waiver if I grew beyond a certain point, so I opted not to enlist. BTW, I grew beyond that point about a year later...

I did enjoy digging fossils out of the limestone around Big Spring though.

In 1971 or 1972 when I was in the early years of high school we took some science-fair projects to the Big Spring base; that must have been near the end of its life.

Since you enjoy paleontology, so you salivate when you see Nansky Peloski's face? I am told that households with dogs have to be careful showing them pictures of her, and dogs do not in general pay attention to pictures, or mirrors, as they have no scent. Comradette Nansky has surpassed even normal animal behavior.

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand

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